We are home!

Friday night was fairly uneventful. Brynlee did not have any fevers, and Blair and Brynlee both slept well. I stayed home for a few extra hours on Saturday morning to clean up my house a little bit, so when I arrived at the hospital on Saturday Brynlee was asleep and they were just getting ready to start her chemo. I asked Blair if they had mentioned anything about going home on Saturday, and he said that they were planning on getting us out of there after chemo. However, when they came in to do her vitals around 3 or so she had a fever of about 101. The nurse took her temperature about 5 times just to make sure and even used a different thermometer, but they all said the same thing. She went to call the doctor to see what they wanted to do, and since they knew that Brynlee had the parainfluenza virus and all of her blood cultures had been negative they decided to give her some Tylenol and send us home. She was so excited to get dressed and get out of there, and we are still fever free (crossing our fingers that it stays that way). She wore her Mickey Mouse mask all the way home and wouldn't let me take it off once we had gotten inside the car. Brynlee refused to wear a mask the first time we went through chemo, so I am glad that she is cooperating this time.

 

So here we are back in the thick of cancer treatment and everything that comes with it. Our home health delivery came last night and consisted of two boxes of dressing change kits, saline flushes, heparin flushes, alcohol wipes, claves, a sharps container and who knows what else is in there - I haven't looked yet. We also administered our first Neupogen shot this morning, which I wasn't nervous about doing until I did it and realized what I was doing. Now that the first one is out of the way, it will just be like old times again. We are doing our Zofran and Benadryl every few hours to help with the nausea from the chemo and will continue that for a few more days, wearing our gloves to change diapers and double hot washing clothing and blankets, and continuing with the Septra for prophylactic UTI and pneumonia coverage. We will also have our twice a week blood draws with our home health nurses. Even through all of that, it is so nice to be doing all of that at home and not in the hospital. We haven't spent nearly as much time in the hospital as many other cancer kids have, but we have spent enough time that we truly appreciate being home.

 

We can have healthy adult visitors to our house; however, we are enforcing our no children policy again like we did the first time she went through treatment. There are just too many illnesses going around and her immune system is essentially nonexistent.

 

We are hoping for a very uneventful two weeks until we are back in the hospital for round 2 of relapse chemo (round 10 overall) - March 5th is just not very far away!